The clouds will soon begin to striate in the west. Their journey took a long time, from the middle of the night to the afternoon, and Simone turns and looks at them. The sky, the fresh breeze. They’re here, and they’re OK, their family, still together.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Lucy says, and she sounds giddy. And Simone ought to be, but something is stopping her. Their old life has ended, here, in a clean blue crossing at the very edge of America.
‘God,’ Damien says, and she’s aware that they’re talking too loudly, acting weirdly, have come back together too quickly, but they can’t help it. ‘We did it.’ He pauses. ‘We can get a proper rental.’ He turns to Simone. ‘You can cook again. Properly cook. You can …’ he says, looking at Lucy.
‘Yes, yes,’ she is saying to Damien.
But Simone sees through it. If she could solve it for her daughter, she would. Lucy’s heart is broken by going to the Bahamas, and she’s kind enough to lie to Damien about it, the same way she can lie to Simone.
‘It’ll be OK,’ Simone says. ‘It’ll start to feel OK,’ she adds, and Lucy nods, her expression grateful and sad, all at once.
CHAPTER 66
The ship is large but not enormous, and they’re let on and allocated two cabins. They are distracted by exploring them, looking out to open waters, and therefore Simone doesn’t realize for some while that the departure time has been and gone, and they’re still moored.
A delay with signalling, or something, says an electronic announcement board in a carpeted corridor. She is trying not to worry the longer it goes on.
Their cabin is like a hotel room. Simone’s never been on a cruise, and to have such opulence in these circumstances feels somewhat distasteful. A white bed with a blue trim, a window seat looking out to the water, a new world of blue, sun the colour of the desert. The sky a feathered watercolour with clouds at the edges. Damien is in the adjoining room, and Simone is still triggered by this: an open door, an empty bed.
She hears a laugh escape from Damien, and then Lucy, breathes a sigh of relief and tries self-talk. It’s fine. This is fine. It was always going to be nerve-racking. It was always going to be hard. She sits down in the window seat and watches the lights of the port.
Lucy comes into her room. ‘We leaving soon or what?’ she says, but there isn’t any anxiety there.
‘I’m sure it’s just a standard delay,’ Simone says, and Lucy sits next to her, there by the little round window. The longer it takes, the more Simone relaxes into it. Surely if it were aboutthem, they’d come and find them in their cabin, or wouldn’t have let them through passport control. There would be a tannoy announcement. Police. But something is brewing in the back of Simone’s mind …
Damien arrives, sits on the bed, and he continues a conversation evidently already started with Lucy. ‘It was a fiver.’
‘No, it was so not,’ Lucy is saying to Damien. She addresses Simone: ‘When we sawBarbieandOppenheimerit was over fifty quid, right?’
‘It was five quid,’ Damien repeats.
‘What decade are you in?’ Lucy says. ‘You can’t even get a coffee for a fiver.’
Simone remembers this well. The three of them had gone. Ithadcost a fortune, but it had been worth it. Something from the before, simple times. A cinema trip where they’d argued over where to eat in the hour between the two films.
‘Simone,’ Damien says, turning to her, ‘didn’t we get in cheap, to celebrate the royal wedding or something?’
This sets Lucy off. ‘The royal wedding was about a decade before that!’ she says. ‘Are you of sound mind? Why would they offer tickets toOppenheimerto celebrate Princess Kate!’
‘All right, I’m mixing up my decades.’ Damien grins benignly, sits back on the bed and crosses his arms. ‘Old person memory, then,’ he says.
‘One hundred per cent,’ Lucy says. ‘Old Boomer.’
Simone watches them for just a few seconds, father and daughter. You have to squint to see any resemblance at all from Damien’s dark features to Lucy’s light, but they’re there if you look. The way they hold themselves, the beginnings of their smiles. Simone still, nevertheless, finds it hard to understand how their DNA has mixed fifty-fifty when Lucy looks like ninety per cent her.
Lucy is laughing at something else and Simone feels aheaviness in her chest as she watches her daughter, who thinks that she is free but isn’t.
And that’s what is bothering her: the paradox of it. The entire reason they are on the run is to keep Lucy free. Simone, too, but mostly Lucy.
But isn’t their daughter, really, in a kind of prison, anyway? She is on the run with only her parents, her future lost, her home long gone. How is this not incarceration, anyway, for Lucy?
They still haven’t left, and other guests are beginning to murmur about it. Simone hears snatches of it as people pass their cabins. The world is still in greyscale beyond the porthole window, October’s fingers inching ever closer, spinning the globe to lengthen the nights. She shivers, even though it isn’t cold.
She crosses the room, exits it on to the deck where the wind whips her hair, looking again at the port’s bright lights. It’s descending from afternoon to dinner time. Funny: Simone still thinks of hours in meal times. Damien is already out there, his hands on the railings, looking into the distance. Maybe they ought to be in the cabin, she thinks, but she wants to be outside, with her husband and the expanse of sea and sky and perceived freedom. The flip phone begins to ring in her hand; she’s surprised to see it’s Moody’s number. On an impulse, she throws it into the sea. They need to be themselves, their new selves. Untraceable back to anyone. Especially him.
‘Good idea,’ Damien says, looking at where the phone was. It’s sunk into the depths, but something about it feels eerily symbolic to Simone. ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘if you ignore the palm trees, it might be England.’
Simone squints at it, but just the wordEnglandis painful for her to hear. She stares at the port. It’s enormous. ‘Hmm.’ She turns to him.
